Iranian Film Line Up in Berlin Festival

Best of luck to the NINE Iranian films that will be featured in this year’s Black International Cinema Berlin, spanning May 7 – 11, 2014. This 29th festival’s tagline is “Pathways to Enlightenment,” honoring Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s visit to Berlin in 1964, and will feature a photography exhibition entitled, “Footprints in the Sand?” The festival aims to promote intercultural communication.

Below is a list of each film and a short description, courtesy of the festival website.

ZENDEGI FAGHAT YEK ETEFAGHE SADE AST // LIFE IS A SIMPLE HAPPENING | Director: Khashayar Matapoor
A young doctor decides to travel for relief and escape from her problems. Coincidentally, she meets a family in Oraman of Kurdistan. The shared experience with the family is very meaningful to her.

ARTESHE PENHAN // HIDDEN ARMY | Director: Mohammad Esmaeili
A lone soldier is running from the enemy. Not the many explosions around him and not even the bullet in his leg is stopping him. But a massive explosion finally pulls him down. He drags himself near a house and puts his back against a palm tree, when suddenly the voice of a woman attracts his attention…

ABRHAYE KOLALEI // COLUMBUS CLOUDS | Director: Bahar Lellahi
Hamidreza, after several years comes back to Iran for his nephew’s marriage, after his engagement has failed and he is disappointed and alone. Gradually, he comes to understand his mother’s and family’s problems.

ZEMESTANE AKHAR // THE LAST WINTER | Director: Salem Salavati
Baji and headman are the sole survivors of an isolated village, which is sinking under water little by little. They are companions and confidants of one another. One night, haphazardly and due to constraints of nature, they are away from each other and Baji is left alone at home. The headman does his best to pass through the snow while Baji, all alone in the village, is embroidering the last part of her story on cloth.

SOSKHA AZ ROSHANAEI MOTANAFERAND // COCKROACHES HATE LIGHT | Director: Hamid Sadeghpoor
A man is trapped in an odorous cubic enclosure and…?

AZ MENHAYE YEK // FROM MINUS ONE | Director: Marjan Ashrafzade
Forced by her husband, Tayebeh is going to a stranger to get her husband’s bad check returned. She is certain, though, that the price will be to sleep with the strange man. Now, to go or not to go, this is her call?

PAYANE FASLE 3 // END OF SEASON 3 | Director: Soran Fahim
A Kurdish writer is writing a story on Anfal, but can’t find an ending for it…

DERAKHTE BADAM // ALMOND | Director: Mokhtar Masoumyan
The story is about a girl who derives a problem because of an old tradition (circumcision). Now at the beginning of her marriage, some other social problems appear. “Almond” is the story of Awat, a girl who encounters traditions and enters a new world full of adversity. Circumcision of girls is performed among traditional Iranian society in some rural regions.

SOBHE ROZE BAAD // THE NEXT MORNING | Director: Ali Hashemi
Sahar wakes up to perform her daily routine. But a strange event has happened because nobody recognizes her. At first, Sahar thinks a mistake has been made, but the shocking fact is, she must face her new reality.

Mehran Tamadon wins the Cinéma du Réel Grand Prize

Iranian filmmaker Mehran Tamadon has won the 36th Cinéma du Réel Grand Prize for his film Iranien:

The filmmaker, an Iranian atheist living in France, invites three religious people to live in his family home. His purpose is to see how life in their shared living room can lead to the first rules of co-existence.

“I’m an Iranian who doesn’t think like them and I tell them so”: from 2010 to 2012, Mehran Tamadon, who lives in France, returns to his family home near Teheran to debate with the “defenders of the Islamic Republic of Iran”. Rearranged for the occasion, the living room is to serve as a shared space where he, the atheist, and three believers will live together on the basis of a commonly agreed constitution. Exhilarating to begin with, this arrangement resembles not so much a rhetorical trap as a family gathering or a psychoanalysis on a territory where many words — and parts of the human body — must not be unveiled. Cooking, lighting a fire, choosing framed photos to put in the library or listening to music: in the most commonplace materiality, it is the frontiers of a world that are being shifted inch by inch, in the painfully utopian hope that living together is possible — a microcosm where the house and the world can communicate. The epilogue recounts the project’s out-of-frame outcome, but the spatial and temporal frame of the film make this experience an unprecedented and heartrending exercise of political philosophy.
(Charlotte Garson)

The festival featured forty films from twenty-six countries. The grand prize awards Tamadon with €8,000.

The film was also shown at the 64th Berlinale Film Festival. You can read The Hollywood Reporter‘s review of the documentary here.

[source: Cinéma du Réel]